Warp Node Madness! (Patreon)

In the last disaster posting, we mentioned that lots of fun stuff happened when implementing the Warp Nodes to 100% Orange Juice. So let's go into more detail on that! I'll reference bits from our design discussion to illustrate various steps.

To begin with, we had 2 separate concepts for the eventual warp node:

"Multiple linked entrances, 1 exit, signaled by a path you can see when hovering a panel"

"4 sets of unique teleports that link 1 to 1 between each other"

After discussion, these turned into the combined effect we have today: 4 types of unique "special warp panels" that can link between multiple entrances or exits depending on map designer.

This had the advantage of more freedom than either model originally had, while still having clear visuals.

We also decided that to make them a more unique pathing tool, players should be able to keep moving through them uninterrupted, instead of it ending your turn (this decision caused some casualties at the office later).

When designing the new panels, we also had to decide what they'll look like. Since we wanted 4 different types, this was an additional challenge. As we try to make everything in the game colorblind friendly, we never rely on just color coding anything. That's why we needed to find a design that makes all 4 sets look like the "same panel" while also being different enough that you can tell them apart.

The initial premise was that the center will show if the warp is an exit or entrance, while the edges have a different pattern for each set (in the end we dropped the entrance/exit distinction since movement arrows will give sufficient information about it already).

Here is the very first look at working(?) warp nodes in action!

And a longer proof of concept:

Looks pretty good! Except that the animation when passing through them was a bit too lightning fast, so we added a good old "warp" animation to them:

At this point the signatory got a nice idea to use these to improve Sunset pathing elegantly - just add a single set of warp nodes that goes in both directions!

... In hindsight this obviously wouldn't work, but it resulted in some very funny behavior!

Next I tried adding more navigation tools to Beginner town:

This one worked pretty well in practice, and may revisit it later (at this point in development, existing fields couldn't actually be edited).

While things are looking good, now that we can start proper testing, some issues are starting to rear their ugly head.

The answer: "wasn't that the settled behavior? Enter any red tp -> teleport to any other red tp"

"Entrance should go to exit, not another entrance."

"There's no concept of entry and exit. The game doesn't even know that."

This is actually true. A panel doesn't know if it has an entrance. It does know if it has an exit though (through the movement pathing - which is used for normal warp panels too, so that same check was added for Warp Nodes). All was well again.

Meanwhile, let's side step to look at a bunch of visual designs for the Warp Node!

Evolution of the Warp Node Panel Visual

The very first proper design went for a warp-like 'pattern', while having different colors and patterns to distinguish the 4 sets.

We even had animated samples already!

It was a bit hard to tell the patterns apart, though, so we brainstormed more varied designs:

They looked pretty good!

You can see the design is already fairly close to what we have in the game in some ways.

We even have a unique animation for when the Warp Panel activates! (hoping to get this one added later!)

After thinking about it though, we figured that seeing 4 different colored panels that are actually the same type might be too visually confusing.

So we tried reversing the color scheme so that the outer shape is always the purple 'warp' color, and only the animation is colored:

Seeing this in action, we easily decided it's the way to go.

Here we added different shapes for each color as well:

In testing, we found out that especially zoomed out the circle and hexagon looked too similar in practice:

So we replaced the hexagon with the star shape:

With this, the visuals were perfect!

... Except we still experimented a bit more and tried making the animations a bit more 'glowy', which everyone loved:

...And now with that fun detour out of the way, we can get back to the technical side, where everything is working as intend---- ^_^

Warping to Hell

record scratch

............

.....

...

Now you may be wondering how we got here.

For that, let get back to an earlier point in the post:

"We also decided that to make them a more unique pathing tool, players should be able to keep moving through them uninterrupted, instead of it ending your turn."

This sounded really great! On paper!

Until you stop to wonder why the game is softlocking, and how to fix it.

Then you think about how movement in the game actually works.

When a unit moves into a 'dead end' - a panel with currently no exit - the movement will end, and then player will activate the panel.

For warp nodes we want player to enter a dead end... and activate its effect before the movement ends. This is actually a fundamental breach of the movement as it existed in the game. Surely nothing can go wrong.

...there's a lot of discussion on various issues cropping up, so I'm skipping a lot of it to give the general idea.

a few builds later

The desperation intensifies as we try to get to the root cause of the issue:

Starting to figure out all possible scenarios related to warp panels really made me appreciate how many there are:

Things are starting to look dire...

...finally it works!!! (After having to break how the entire movement logic works in the game).

...Well, almost works.

For this final segment it was an intense, chaotic journey, so I found the easiest way to describe it to just share bits of our internal chat. Hopefully you found it interesting!

... Let's get warping!